Work in Professor Myers' laboratory is directed towards the synthesis of interesting and novel organic compounds using metal-mediated processes. In one major effort, involving a long-standing collaboration between the Myers lab and the lab of Prof. Dean Harman of the University of Virginia, Myers and his students work with electron-rich metal systems capable of binding to a carbon-carbon double bond in aromatic rings (benzene and benzene-related species, pyrroles, pyridines, furans, etc), disrupting the aromatic stabilization of the ring and making the ring susceptible to attack by reagents that normally would not react with such rings. In addition, the metal system blocks one face of the ring, so that such reactions yield stereospecific derivatives. Removal of these elaborated molecules from the metal gives products with potential utility as therapeutic medicines. In a second effort, Myers and his students collaborate with the lab of Prof. Gupton here at UR, in work that uses metal-based "cross-coupling" chemistry to convert carbon-halogen bonds (C-Cl or C-Br) to new carbon-carbon bonds, thus linking two separate molecular fragments into one new compound. Again, the products of these reactions have potential as medicinal drugs. As a synthetic group, much of our work involves conducting chemical reactions, isolating and purifying products, and acquiring characterization data to determine or confirm the structure and stereochemistry of these products. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy gives us information about hydrogen, carbon, and phosphorus atoms in the chemicals with which we work as well as insights into their connectivity and spatial relationships, and Mass Spectrometry (MS) tells us about molecular composition. We use chromatographic techniques for separation and identification of products, in the form of GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spec) and HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatography) instruments.